Outcry after Republicans vote to dismantle independent ethics body

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Office of Congressional Ethics was created in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawmakers

Under the changes pushed by Republican Bob Goodlatte, seen here listening to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the independent body would fall under the control of the House Ethics Committee, which is run by lawmakers. Photograph: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

Under the changes pushed by Republican Bob Goodlatte, seen here listening to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the independent body would fall under the control of the House Ethics Committee, which is run by lawmakers. Photograph: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

House Republicans have gutted an independent ethics watchdog, putting it under their own control, in a secret ballot hours before the new Congress convened for the first time.

The unheralded vote severely weakens the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), which was set up after a lobbying scandal in 2008 to investigate corruption allegations against members of Congress. The move, led by the head of the House judiciary committee, defied the Republican congressional leadership and was reportedly supported by several legislators currently under OCE scrutiny.

The amendment was voted through by the House Republican conference over the new year with no prior notice nor debate and inserted in a broad rules package the House will vote for on Tuesday. It turns the formerly independent OCE into the Office of Congressional Complaint Review, a subordinate body to the House Ethics Committee, which is currently run by the Republican majority and has a long history of overlooking charges of malfeasance by lawmakers.

The new body will not be able to receive anonymous tips from members of Congress or make its findings public.

The vote comes at a time when the Republicans control all three branches of government and are seeking to remove some of the residual constraints on their powers. The rules package to be voted through on Tuesday, for example, will limit the ability of the Democratic minority to block legislation like the repeal of Obama’s Affordable Care Act by staging a filibuster.

It also comes at a time when president-elect Trump is attempting to fend off scrutiny over multiple conflicts of interests questions arising from his bid to keep his business empire in his family’s hands even after he takes office on 20 January.

The House Republican vote triggered a wave of outrage from Democrats and government ethics specialists.

“Undermining the independence of the House’s Office of Congressional Ethics would create a serious risk to members of Congress, who rely on OCE for fair, nonpartisan investigations, and to the American people, who expect their representatives to meet their legal and ethical obligations,” Norman Eisen and Richard Painter, ethics counsels to Barack Obama and George W Bush respectively, argued in a joint statement.

“If the 115th Congress begins with rules amendments undermining OCE it is setting itself up to be dogged by scandals and ethics issues for years and is returning the House to dark days when ethics violations were rampant and far too often tolerated.”

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, said: “Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in the House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions,” Pelosi said in a statement.

“Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”

Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia who pushed for the changes, defended the vote.

“The amendment builds upon and strengthens the existing Office of Congressional Ethics by maintaining its primary area of focus of accepting and reviewing complaints from the public and referring them, if appropriate, to the Committee on Ethics,” the judiciary committee chairman said in a statement.

Goodlatte did not explain how the OCE had been strengthened by being stripped of its independence and stopped from making public statements.

The OCE was set up in 2008 after a string of corruption scandals involving two Republican politicians and a Democrat. Former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a California Republican, served more than seven years in prison on bribery and other charges.

Ohio Republican congressman Bob Ney pleaded guilty to corruption charges and a Louisiana Democrat and former congressman, William Jefferson, was convicted on corruption in a separate case.